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In \u201cThe New Look,\u201d an Apple TV+ show premiering Feb. 14, wine glasses are never empty, cigarettes are always half-smoked and everyone is thin. The series follows two titans of French fashion, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, after all, toward the end of World War II.<\/p>\n
But this glamorous portrayal of Paris\u2019s creative milieu is also interested in how the French elite collaborated with their Nazi occupiers during this contested period. It offers a startling throwback to a time when swastika-stamped flags hung over the streets of Paris<\/a>. From 1940 to 1944, the French Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis and deported over 70,000 Jews to death camps, sent French workers to Germany and tried to crush the French resistance.<\/p>\n The show\u2019s main action starts in 1943. Chanel (played by Juliette Binoche), a star of French fashion, is living at the Ritz Hotel, which was then a Nazi headquarter, where she hosts her boyfriend, the German spy Hans G\u00fcnther von Dincklage (Claes Bang).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cChanel was an excellent survivor,\u201d said Binoche, sitting on a couch in the wood-paneled bar at the Hotel Regina Louvre, which stood in for the Ritz on the show. Binoche \u2014 wearing a white shirt layered with a black bustier, tie and pants \u2014 said she read several biographies of the designer to prepare for the role, and was impressed by how Chanel\u2019s creativity and business savvy took her from childhood poverty to the top of the European elite.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Playing the character in this period of her life was challenging, the actress added, because \u201cthere\u2019s so many layers of gray going on.\u201d On the show, we see Chanel invoking Vichy\u2019s Aryan laws<\/a> in a failed bid to eject her Jewish business partners from the company. She travels to Madrid at the request of an S.S. general in a bizarre attempt to broker peace between Germany and Britain (Winston Churchill, whom she knew personally, declines to meet).<\/p>\n Her great rival Dior, played as shy and contained by Ben Mendelsohn, is not yet a famous designer. He works for Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich), creating evening gowns for the Nazis, even as he supports his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), a resistance fighter who is eventually sent to a concentration camp.<\/p>\n Mendelsohn, in a blue coat, sitting next to Binoche in the Regina bar, said he didn\u2019t approach his character by thinking about the morality of Dior\u2019s choices. \u201cThe start of modern acting is to empathize with your character,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to play someone with a highly externalized idea of them. You have to climb in.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show\u2019s creator, Todd A. Kessler \u2014 who previously worked with Mendelsohn <\/strong>on \u201cBloodline<\/a>\u201d \u2014 was drawn to setting a show in occupied France because it meant characters were making decisions in extreme and fast-evolving circumstances, he said during the interview at the bar.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not as inspiring to think of anyone as a villain or as a hero,\u201d Kessler said. \u201cEvery person is many different people. Under different circumstances, you might respond differently.\u201d<\/p>\n It was also essential, Kessler said, for the show to be shot on location, \u201con the same streets that Christian Dior and Coco Chanel walked and lived, to be in the same cafes and hotels that the Nazis occupied.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe New Look\u201d reveals the tragic \u2014 and hidden \u2014 history of some of Paris\u2019s elegant buildings, recreating the Gestapo\u2019s torture house<\/a>. just a couple of miles from the Eiffel Tower, as well as the interior of the Lutetia Hotel<\/a>, which, after the war, housed returning camp survivors, its lobby crowded with desperate families hoping to find their loved ones.<\/p>\n For decades after the war, successive French governments refused to acknowledge the brutality of the collaborationist regime and the silent support it enjoyed among large swaths of the population. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac formally recognized<\/a> France\u2019s responsibility for deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But recently, debates about the period of occupation have been heating up again in France, with some far-right politicians arguing that the Vichy government has been judged too harshly. \u00c9ric Zemmour, who won 7 percent of the vote<\/a> in the first round of France\u2019s 2022 presidential election, has claimed the government saved French Jews during<\/a> the war, disregarding any historical evidence.<\/p>\n The country\u2019s largest far-right party was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an avowed admirer of the Vichy leader, Philippe P\u00e9tain<\/a>. Marine Le Pen, his daughter, another prominent politician in that party, once claimed<\/a> the French state wasn\u2019t responsible for the most notorious roundup of Jews in France during World War II; she has since tried to sanitize her party\u2019s image<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cFor countries like the United States and France \u2014 who see themselves as beacons of light and democracy \u2014 it can be uncomfortable to face the past, because we didn\u2019t live by those principles\u201d said Sarah Fishman, a historian and the author of \u201cFrance at War: Vichy and the Historians,\u201d in a recent interview.<\/p>\n To Binoche, the show\u2019s themes also felt personal. Members of her Polish extended family were deported to Auschwitz \u201cbecause they were intellectuals, and hid Jewish people,\u201d she said. Her grandparents were separately detained by the Russian and German armies during the war, and afterward her grandmother slowly made her way from Poland to the south of France.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a lot of damage from the war,\u201d Binoche said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On \u201cThe New Look,\u201d high fashion helps revive the French spirit. After Paris\u2019s liberation, Lelong organizes what he calls \u201can exhibition of hope\u201d: a miniature fashion show in an annex to the Louvre of more than 200 dolls<\/a>, dressed in outfits created by designers including Balenciaga, Balmain and Dior, since there was not enough fabric to fit human models. More than 100,000 people visited the showcase of French craftsmanship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The following year, in 1946 \u2014 when bread was still being rationed in Paris, and coal and fuel were scarce \u2014 Dior broke with Lelong, and founded his own fashion house on Avenue Montaigne.<\/p>\n His postwar collection \u2014 which became known as \u201cthe new look\u201d \u2014 was an instant hit, and helped return Paris to the center<\/a> of the couture world, after London and New York had dominated during the war. \u201cPeople need to dream again,\u201d Dior says on the show, as he watches his models walk a runway in long pink and white dresses.<\/p>\n Very little, in fact, was new in Dior\u2019s collection. A comfortable reminder of France\u2019s prewar glories, the look centered on a corseted, hyperfeminine silhouette, with long skirts layered in taffeta and silk, a pinched waist and small, tilted hats. He drew inspiration from the flowers of his mother\u2019s garden.<\/p>\n The outfits were a world away from Chanel\u2019s designs of the 1920s, which had liberated women from the corset and given them outfits for hunting, sailing and playing tennis, as well as attending cocktail parties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The house of Dior, now chaired by Delphine Arnault, helped design the dresses featured in the show, and let Kessler roam its archives for inspiration (Chanel wasn\u2019t associated with the production).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Binoche said she accepted the role \u201cright away,\u201d and was drawn to the show\u2019s depiction of Dior and Chanel as artists, trying to create regardless of their circumstances. \u201cDior and Chanel needed fine arts, they needed to be in touch with Cocteau, Stravinsky, Picasso, Max Jacob,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In Paris, high fashion survived the war. But the flourishing artistic scene of the prewar years that both Chanel and Dior enjoyed \u2014 the years of surrealism, Russian ballets and dancing in cafes that became known as \u201cles Ann\u00e9es folles\u201d \u2014 never truly returned.<\/p>\n